If you read the title of the review and wondered whether we already reviewed
the Asus M3A78 Pro, you're probably not alone. Despite all the good products
that Asus has produced over the years, they, as well as scores of other companies,
fail in one simple criteria: nomenclature. The M3A78 Pro is an
ATX board based on AMD's 780G chipset. That makes enough sense. The M3N78
Pro, which we reviewed recently, is an ATX board featuring nVidia's Geforce
8300 chipset. That doesn't make much sense; why not M3N830 Pro?

The two boards appear to have the exact same feature set, with only the chipset
differentiating them. This provides an unique opportunity  assuming that
Asus did not favor one chipset over the other in their implementation, this
is as close as it gets to direct chipset comparison with actual retail products.
And it's a worthy comparison considering the chipsets in question. When 780G
was released, it was a milestone for IGP's  providing full high definition
video offloading and far superior gaming performance in the form of the Gigabyte
GA-MA78GM-S2H we reviewed in the spring. And now after a few months, it's
had time to mature. The Geforce 8300 impressed us quite a bit, too. While the
Asus M3N78 Pro lacked high 3D performance, it compensated by being extremely
proficient in all other areas. We found the M3N78 Pro to be an efficient motherboard
that worked very well straight out of the box no real issues, a rarity these
days.

The M3A78 Pro box with its semi-reflective green coating is almost identical
to the M3N78 Pro. This should be interesting.